Future Mod

[Tholish]

Hate to bump this, which isn't working, but I need help.

My mod crashes for very shifty reasons. In the late game, the third future era, there is almost always a CTD, but there's no rhyme or reason to it. Usually by eliminating things from a savegame I can find out which civ is crashing. By eliminating the capitol or certain crazy combinations of cities I can avert the crash. In fact, most recently I found that I could simply cut out the Arcology building (my version, the big duralloy space station sticking out of the ground and towering over the city) from the capitol and no crash. By restating with altered XML, I can make the Arcology do absolutely nothing (normally eliminates pop unhealthy and gives an artist) and look like another building completely, and still a crash. I have to eliminate it from the capitol with WB. Also, by reducing population by one I get no crash. I have cut out other features--made a python and dll free version and still it had this crash. Cut out funny stuff like each citizen taking 3 food (with yields adjusted to compensate). Still the crash. In another game, I could avert the crash just by moving population around so the city had less food--it wasn't near going up in population, it just couldn't tolerate having food too much food that turn. The next turn, I could put the citizens back and the crisis was averted. Just that one turn there needed to be less food.

 

[The_J]

Maybe a problem with CityLSystem\PlotLSystem?
Both are era dependent, and the graphics from cities change when they grow, the graphics from improvements change, then they are worked, and missing art/wrong artdefines cause a crash here.

 

[GreatLordofPie]

I've been trying to do a scenario with your FutEarth map, but when I opened up WorldBuilder, 4 civs were dead! Please help!
thx,
GLP
Edit: never mind. fixed it in dll

 

[globalempire]

im confused and i want to download this mo, it looks thing is i don't now where to download the most recent versions or patches. i downloaded the one in the first post but im not sure it that is the most recent work. could someone point me in the right direction

 

[globalempire]

Alright now how do in play the mod. there is no way to start it up, or so it seems

 

[wire]

I have som questions about this mod. Im am very new to Civ 4 mods so i wonder, is it possible to play this mod together with atother mods, like Stone age mod, total realism and revolution for example?

 

[wire]

Another question: which custom map i still playable on and does the mod work in multiplayer?

 

[Asthix]

I have som questions about this mod. Im am very new to Civ 4 mods so i wonder, is it possible to play this mod together with atother mods, like Stone age mod, total realism and revolution for example?

Nope. When Tholish said this mod is meant as a platform for other future based mods he meant that this mod could be used by modders to to create multiple planet scenarios, provide neat future era techs and goodies, etc.

As for your other question, you should be able to play on all civ4 base map types but if you want multiple planets you need to play those specific maps that Tholish made.
Don't know about multiplayer compatability.

Hope to see you back Tholish. You were so close to version 1.0!

 

[Tholish]

I'm back. Here's the latest.

http://www.atomicgamer.com/file.php?id=83939

This is stable all the way through the game now (finally) and I've made some important changes.

Added some cool events, especially related to the global warming feature "mutation." Terraforming buildings have a smaller area of effect, but events cause them to break down so they can be rebuilt (but they only break down where they have done their job, so (1) the ai that blindly builds them for the food doesn't just wreck the environment randomly but instead gets channelled into using them right and (2) the food bonuses dont pile up to the sky). Spacecraft now have air attacks and the AIs available to each kind have been made more appropriate. Have a plan for revamping earlier era units also. Dumped the Omniscience civic and replaced it with Mind Perfection. Space is much less productive and faster to move through, so planets get colonized.

And no more of this:

<iMaxGlobalInstances>1</iMaxGlobalInstances>
<iMaxTeamInstances>-1</iMaxTeamInstances>
<iMaxPlayerInstances>1</iMaxPlayerInstances>

or this

<iExtraPlayerInstances>-1</iExtraPlayerInstances>



Also updated the dll sources and in fact reconstructed the dll from scratch.
Provided a sort of partial credits file.
Changed the era civs so you can get any civ from the present or the past (but not the future). Thus in the far future eras civs of any era can crop up, but in ancient era starts ancient era civs exist. Still need to make more civ colors to deal with this.

Fixed the python so no more exceptions from barb civs emerging, and more appropriate text messages.


Regarding some questions above, you unzip the mod and put it in your mods directory. The name must be FutureMod. If there are patches, you unzip them and drag the FutureMod folder into the mods directory and let windows merge them.

You cannot play two mods together, they have to be merged, though there are modular mods and mods that let you select components.

The private maps are playable, I recommend ThreePlanets. The scenarios need some updating, but FutEarth is decent.

 

[Tssha]

Woohoo! Another version of FutureMod! I've gotta try this out right away.

Glad to hear it's more stable and less broken. Good to see that time was well spent.

 

[Asthix]

Sweet gonna try it tomorrow!

 

[Korias]

I've got a few questions, while some of which have been answered, the answers given were unclear.

1. Multiplayer comes in all varieties - hotseat, online, LAN, ect. Online and LAN have Simultaneous turns, but Hotseat does not. As far as I can remember, Revolution's issue was with that feature. Does that infer that Hotseat works or is all multiplayer impossible?

2. By starting an Ancient Era game, you will only go up against Ancient Era leaders, but if you start a Modern era game, Ancient/Renaissance/Medieval leaders can spawn from the Revolutions system, correct?

3. How do systems handle the multi-map system? What specs are you using to get to the late game? What map size?

4. As a modder, I'm intrigued as to how you accomplished that map system. Did you do it entirely through the DLL or is it in the Map generation's python?

5. Beyond things like units or buildings, what else have you pulled from other mods to accomplish your goal? Is there a list of changes and features somewhere?

 

[Tholish]

1. Multiplayer comes in all varieties - hotseat, online, LAN, ect. Online and LAN have Simultaneous turns, but Hotseat does not. As far as I can remember, Revolution's issue was with that feature. Does that infer that Hotseat works or is all multiplayer impossible?

The only parts of Revolution that are in the 3.19 version are AutoPlay and the python only version of Barbarian Civs. The Change Leader version I use is based on the old Dale version. Thus I think it will work with multiplayer, I've never tried it. I mean to put in RevolutionMP whenever I get around to it though.

2. By starting an Ancient Era game, you will only go up against Ancient Era leaders, but if you start a Modern era game, Ancient/Renaissance/Medieval leaders can spawn from the Revolutions system, correct?

Currently. This was not true in earlier versions, but I felt restricted by too few civs and my main complaint was with seeing late civs in an early game, since I can rationalize that early civs in a late game are reactionaries. However, I've got this here CivicLeaders modcomp now and all that is gonna change.

3. How do systems handle the multi-map system? What specs are you using to get to the late game? What map size?

There's not a multi map system. All I have is a map script that makes planets side by side on a single map separated by strips of space. Each planet has the same amount of wrap as a regular map (and is roughly 30 high and 60 wide) but beyond the poles is about 12 tiles of space and one or more planets. All spacecraft can travel so fast that location on a single planet is unimportant. They can always get into space in a single turn. A multi map system will take a long time. Then again, Civ VI is a long way away. Modding something two generation old will be REALLY lame.

My system is unspectacular, two cores about 2.2 ghz, 3 gig ram. The largest maps are about 60 by 200, but the AI doesn't usually settle all the planets on those maps. There is very little AI modification, it seldom gets a huge delay. I haven't crashed the latest version yet, though it has hung a couple of times. However, those hangs I couldn't even reproduce to debug, I just started from the last autosave and played through.

4. As a modder, I'm intrigued as to how you accomplished that map system. Did you do it entirely through the DLL or is it in the Map generation's python?

As stated above, its python. In fact, its a pretty crude adaptation of the Highlands map script, one of the first things I did. I mean to do a little more refinement on it, mainly regarding lattitudes, putting jungle and dry lands on Earth, carbonice on the poles of Mars.

5. Beyond things like units or buildings, what else have you pulled from other mods to accomplish your goal? Is there a list of changes and features somewhere?

Oh, there should be. This mod per se has been in development since late 2008 (or 2004 in an indirect descent). I pulled stuff from all over and documented haphazardly. Tracking stuff down takes away from modding and testing time.

 

[Red Boxer]

Some things I have noted:
-Knights have a motorcycle soldier graphic
-Field Cannon lacks a graphic
-New civs (chinese, romans, etc) keep on getting popups saying they have formed, but there isn't anywhere on the map for them. Are they popping up on another map perhaps?
What is going on with mines? I can build them on resources, but nowhere else, recently I have been able to build a second type of mine on the resources but it is weaker.
-Improvements in general are a little strange in their displays. Farms wouldn't display as buildable unless they were on clear grass. That is to say if there was a forest there I couldn't click a button and have them chop and build. After I lost the ability to chop (gotta get steel now) I could still chop on certain improvements (plantations, for example) to build them.
-The AI is pretty bad at figuring out your game. Nearly all of the civs (12 total) have about 250 points or less (with six have less than 100). My rival and I are the only two really developed civs with over 500 points each.
-1100 AD and my rival and I are in the industrial era.

Tholish you are a mad scientist. This is a really bizarre, frightening and ingenious mod you have created and I'm enjoying it, but you have lots of details to smooth out.

 

[Vylinius]

The miner bugs and missing things don't really bother me it is the AI playing on Deity I was in far future when most ais were still pre dark ages.

 

[ASCreator]

great work done yet.
while i played your mod, i found some points.
first i saw babarien canons standing on the sea. Second, it seems that the ai do not settle the whole space on earth, some parts are still free. third i cannot build farmes until i clear the woods. this seems also to be one of the most problems the ai has with the mod. fourth the ai is a bit weak, but this can be because of the easy difficulty. fifth, the growth of the cities seems to be quite slow. should it be so slow, or did i something wrong? and last point. it would be nice if the moon cities would also grow, so i have new big opponents when rising to a space race.

ohh and... i found a crash again. load my saved game... crash... load again... crash again.

looking forward too enjoy your mod.

 

[Tholish]

I'm redoing the whole thing from scratch based on all the work already done, plus feedback here.

What I'm doing is making a core mod called Future Ultra Light that stays under 10 mb by using every trick in the book--referencing all the stock material available in a standard installation, using the smallest sized units and buildings where nothing in the official material will do, trimmming what is uneeded out of those, reducing the sizes of files etc...(Did you know a terrain texture can be shrunken to dramatically decrease its size and it will still work and look pretty much like it did before?). This core mod will be supplemented by "expansion packs." I'm waiting until its perfect before I release it. Its working fine right now, but needs more playtesting and refinement. Currently the whole past era is basically unmodded civ, except for the modern where it starts to merge with a whole future era thing, and the rels. This time I'll have Dharmism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Transhumanism, Virtualism, Swarmism, and Paganism. And the old civics stayed in, but I changed them to balance with the future era civics that were added. And barbs changed, they have their own invisible, and come in Marauder, Pirate, Terrorist, and Attack Satellite.

It uses a new modcomp, CivicLeaders, to have leaders of civs change depending on civic selections, but also adds some future only civs so there will still be the Era Changes (but only for that). Also for this version no barb civs or change civ, but autoplay is still in--its an indispensible testing tool. Change civ is a testing tool also, but not as necessary. The Final Frontier spaceships start as advanced naval ships, then eventually ground hugging hover craft, and only the last upgrade of each type is actually a spacecraft.

Having made THIS mod, I built the skills and toolkit to make this new one. I learned a lot about how to organize the project and how not to, and I also learned a lot about designing a civ mod generally. For example, one thing I learned was the value of having lots of buildings. Actually, you can make them more expensive. And definitely none of this "free building" stuff. I found the pedestals in Afterworld and they are a whole line of building sized Artificial Intelligences. If you have more buildings than time to build them you have lots of choices. If theres a set series of buildings you build, finishing them just as the next becomes available, there's less choice.

I want this ultra light version to fit with later more extensively modded ones, but be based on regular civ. It will form a skeleton to add to, but be playable by itself.

 

[Graceheart the Leopard]

I haven't played against most of the leaders yet, but you should really, really update the leaderheads in this mod (Hitler is Augustus with a moustache? WTH?).

 

[Tholish]

And a blue shirt and black armor standing in front of a decrepit railroad car. I intentionally made a really bad Hitler. I felt he demanded inclusion but not respect. The idea was to convey theatricality and copied fantasies of glory against a backdrop of sordid atrocity and decay.

The UltraLight version exclusively uses stock leaderheads in clever rearrangements. For instance Pibulsongram from RTW in front of Montezumas pyramids for Calles of Mexico. Leaders are one of the main things that bloats download size, but you have to have something fresh to look at, especially for the future. My current plan is to then piggyback other mods for a "frills" pack, essentially saying, "Download and install these mods for the leaderheads," and only include XML for reaching into those other mods by path to run the leaderheads. People download the same 400 mb mods made with the the same dozens of 5mb leaderheads and have multiple copies of each one. I think I'll probably use CivGold for the past part and thus only have to add future era leaderheads directly.

EDIT: although I could also just do a bunch of "patches" so that you can just add leaderheads from whatever other mods you have installed by patching in new XML that connects them to the FutureMod. Incidently, I'm naming the Civs by the modern name rather than the earliest one, ie Mexico not Aztecs, and consolidating civs so that Greece gets Justinian and Germany gets Charlemagne for instance.

 

[Asthix]

Ooh I'm betting it will be out before Civ5 too! Can't wait!